BTG Logo & Visuals
When designing the logo for the app, I explored many different directions, experimenting with various moods, type treatments, and visual metaphors. My goal was to create something that not only felt modern and engaging but also instantly communicated its connection to the aquarium. I wanted users to recognize, at a glance, that this app was tied to the experience of being “beyond the glass,” immersed in marine life and discovery.
In addition to the logo, the overall visual system needed to be carefully considered. The design had to feel clean, professional, and approachable, while still reflecting the aquarium’s identity. I pulled inspiration from the aquarium’s existing branding and physical environment, ensuring consistency between the app and the in-person experience. The color palette, typography, and background imagery were all chosen to align with the aquarium’s visual language, deep ocean blues, aquatic gradients, and minimal but impactful iconography.
Ultimately, both the logo and visuals were designed with the same purpose: to create a cohesive, recognizable brand system that felt immersive, trustworthy, and reflective of the aquarium’s mission to educate and inspire.
Logo Sketches
Logo Exploration
When developing the logo for Beyond the Glass, I wanted to capture the essence of the aquarium experience while keeping the design versatile enough to work across digital and physical touchpoints. I began by sketching a wide range of ideas that explored different moods and metaphors, from literal marine imagery to more abstract visual systems.
Whale Motifs
Several concepts centered around whales and whale tails as framing devices. Whales are iconic, majestic marine animals, and their tail or body naturally creates curved shapes that could hold or surround the text. These designs leaned more narrative and family-friendly, making the brand feel approachable and connected to ocean storytelling.
Bubbles & Abbreviations
Another set of sketches experimented with the abbreviation BTG inside bubbles. Bubbles are immediately recognizable symbols of being underwater, while also adding lightness and motion. In one concept, a fish exhales bubbles that spell out “B T G,” blending illustration with typography. This direction felt modern, flexible, and particularly well-suited for digital applications like an app icon.
Fluid Shapes & Integrated Fish
A third direction explored fluid, splash-like shapes and fish integrated into typography. The splash forms conveyed energy and excitement, almost like a playful stamp. In another sketch, a fish silhouette was used in place of a letter, merging the brand name with a clear marine symbol. Circular badge concepts with fish enclosing “BTG” also emerged here, pointing toward a bold emblem style.
Reflection
By sketching across these three directions—literal, symbolic, and abstract, I was able to explore a spectrum of possibilities. Some leaned more illustrative and family-focused, while others offered the clean versatility needed for branding. This process allowed me to test how far the logo could stretch, and ultimately helped me identify the balance between playfulness and clarity that the final mark needed to achieve.
Type Explorations
For the type exploration, I focused on keeping the design clean, simple, and highly legible. Since this app is designed for a wide audience, including families, children, and adults, it was important that the typography communicated clearly across different age groups and literacy levels.I prioritized fonts that balance modern clarity with friendliness, ensuring the typeface felt approachable without losing professionalism. Legibility at different scales was a key consideration: the logo and type treatments needed to hold up both on small app icons and navigation bars, as well as on larger signage or marketing materials.
The goal was to create a typographic system that felt timeless, instantly recognizable, and adaptable across multiple contexts. By choosing simplicity and clarity as guiding principles, the type design strengthens the overall brand while ensuring accessibility for every visitor.
After exploring a range of options, I landed on the starred typefaces: Roboto Bold and Merriweather.
Roboto Bold was chosen for the logo and key interface elements because of its excellent scalability. It maintains clarity and strength at small sizes, making it ideal for app icons and navigation, while still feeling bold and impactful when scaled up for signage or branding. Its geometric simplicity also reinforces the clean, modern tone of the app.
Merriweather complements Roboto by providing warmth and readability for longer blocks of text. Its slightly more traditional, humanist letterforms make it approachable and easy on the eyes, which is especially valuable for conservation updates, directions, and educational content.
This pairing balances functionality with personality, ensuring text feels both trustworthy and inviting.
Together, Roboto Bold and Merriweather create a flexible, accessible, and cohesive typographic system that works seamlessly across different scales and contexts.
Digital Logo Iterations
This was my first round of digital logo explorations, and ultimately, I wasn’t satisfied with the outcomes. While each design had elements I appreciated, such as the deep blue color palette and the use of bold, confident lines, the overall compositions didn’t capture the clarity or personality I was aiming for. The concepts felt fragmented rather than cohesive, and none of them fully communicated the balance between playfulness and professionalism that the brand needed.
Recognizing this, I chose to step back and return to the drawing board, pulling forward the elements that worked and rethinking how to unify them into a stronger, more intentional design direction. This process of iteration helped me refine my priorities and move closer to a final solution that felt both clear and distinctive.
Visual Farming
After realizing my first digital attempts weren’t successful, I shifted my approach. Instead of forcing a logo direction too early, I began gathering visual inspiration from Canva and online sources that resonated with the tone I wanted the app to convey.
As I collected these references, I started to build a mood board that captured the brand’s atmosphere, deep aquatic colors, bold graphic lines, and clean, modern shapes. This process allowed me to step back and refocus on the emotional qualities I wanted the logo and visuals to communicate, rather than just the technical execution.
The mood board became a guiding framework for the next stage of iteration. By clarifying the tone and aesthetic direction, it gave me a foundation to return to logo sketching with more clarity, confidence, and creative alignment.
First Iteration With Potential
This was the first digital iteration that I felt had real potential. The design felt dynamic, full of movement, and visually engaging, which aligned with the lively, immersive energy I wanted the brand to carry. It stood out as more cohesive than my earlier explorations and showed me I was getting closer to the right direction.
However, it ultimately leaned too far toward a surf shop aesthetic playful and casual in a way that didn’t fully match the aquarium’s mission or audience. Additionally, the typefaces I used here strayed from the original typographic system I had established, creating a disconnect between the logo and the rest of the brand.
While not the right solution, this iteration was an important step in helping me recognize the balance I needed to strike: energetic but not overly playful, clean but not sterile.
Second Iterations With Potential
In these iterations, I explored a bolder and calmer tone for the logo. I appreciated the confidence and clarity it conveyed, the strong lines and simplified shapes gave it a professional presence and aligned more closely with the aquarium’s identity.
That said, the design ultimately felt too minimal. Instead of reading as a unified logo, it came across as three separate elements placed together, lacking the cohesion needed to feel like one seamless mark. While it captured the right mood, it still needed refinement to bring the pieces into harmony and create a single, memorable form.
This step was valuable in showing me the importance of integration over simplicity alone, a logo must feel whole, not just clean
Final Iteration
This final logo succeeds because it strikes the balance I was searching for throughout my iterations. Earlier versions each had strengths, some were dynamic but leaned too playful (surf shop aesthetic), while others were bold but felt disjointed, reading as separate pieces rather than a unified whole.
These explorations helped me realize the logo needed to be clean, cohesive, and versatile, while still carrying energy and personality.
The final design achieves that balance. The bold typography of GLASS anchors the logo with strength and clarity, ensuring legibility at every scale. The fish, integrated directly into the word, introduces movement and storytelling, symbolizing the idea of going “beyond the glass” of an aquarium tank. Its deep blue tone provides a calm but vibrant contrast, keeping the design professional while still approachable for families and kids.
Unlike previous iterations, this logo feels unified, adaptable, and memorable. It communicates both the identity of the app and the essence of the aquarium experience, immersive, educational, and engaging.
App Icon
App Icon Design
When translating the Beyond the Glass brand into an app icon, my goal was to create something that was instantly recognizable, clean at small scales, and consistent with the larger brand identity.
Visual Simplicity
The icon uses a single fish silhouette in the brand’s signature deep blue. This choice ensures the design remains highly legible and uncluttered, even on smaller mobile screens where detail can easily get lost. By avoiding unnecessary complexity, the fish becomes a bold, memorable symbol that communicates “aquarium” at a glance.
Consistency with the Logo
The fish is the same element integrated into the main logo, which builds brand consistency across all touchpoints. Placing the fish against a solid background echoes the bold, high-contrast style of the wordmark while simplifying it for app usage. This ensures that users can quickly connect the icon to the larger identity of Beyond the Glass.
Cross-Platform Scalability
As shown in both Android and iOS mockups, the icon works seamlessly across platforms. On Android, it stands out clearly in a crowded grid of colorful, detailed icons. On iOS, its minimal silhouette fits well with Apple’s clean aesthetic, holding its own alongside native apps like Settings and Health. The design is flexible enough to scale between app icons, navigation tabs, and other digital contexts.
Why It Works
Recognizable: The fish is an intuitive, universal marine symbol.
Clean: Minimal lines and bold color maintain clarity at small scales.
Consistent: Ties directly back to the full logo and brand system.
Versatile: Works across both major platforms without losing impact.
This concludes my logo and visual exploration section